For change to succeed, more change may be required. That’ s not something the change-phobic like to hear, but it has worked for me in the past and I’m hoping it will again.
I’d seen the 5:2 diet on Michael Mosley’s Horizon documentary, but I wanted more information before taking it on. Now that I’ve snacked on the official book, it’s time to tuck in.
It’s might be called a fast diet, but it’s not quick. There have been a few false starts. Suddenly reducing calorie intake to 500 is not easy. Telling myself “I can eat tomorrow” wasn’t helping.
This time, I decided to adopt a strategy that’s been successful in the past.
Eating habits are strongly linked to other habits. So, when I slept in and was late for work, disrupting the ususal routines, I decided to harness the opportunity and deployed the “swap it” strategy.
Running late made it easy to avoid the usual breakfast order at the coffee shop; the queues were too long. From that point, it was easy to adjust other daily routines and avoid the usual food-associated times and events by replacing them with other stuff.
The plan now is to organise a late start every Tuesday. In order to improve the likelihood of success, the change in eating habits will be accompanied by a change in work routines.
Back to the story. Everything was going well until about 7pm. At that point I suddenly found myself devouring 12 slices of cheese. It was the most convenient food stuff in the fridge.
How to change the evening routine so that food temptations are minimised?
The brain was surprisingly quick to produce an answer … go to the movies straight from work.
The brain was probably tapping into a long held association between Tuesday and cheap movie tickets. To encourage patronage, the cinemas drop the price a little on Tuesday. I hope they still do?
I’m very excited about this development. I now have a justifiable excuse to indulge in a movie ticket.
“Hi”, someone will say. “What have you heard about this movie? Is it any good?”
“Oh, I didn’t choose to see this movie”, I’ll respond. “I’m just here to lose weight.”
References
Cherrie Zell 
What are your thoughts?